Looks Like That Post-Rapture Pet-Walking Company Was A Hoax

by: March 22, 2012

A New Hampshire man who claimed last year that for a fee of $135 he would arrange to have your dog walked if the Rapture did indeed begin last May 21 and you got taken up to heaven, is now saying that his business venture was a hoax.

In a post on a blog that promotes his book The Atheist Camel, Centre now writes that he was essentially just satirizing broadcaster Harold Camping’s much-publicized prediction that the Rapture was about to begin:

“Eternal Earth-Bound Pets employs no paid rescuers. It has no clients. It has never issued a service certificate. It has accepted no service contract applications nor received any payments – not a single dollar – in the almost three years of its existence. If I had received a payment my conscience and ethics would have prohibited me from keeping it, as would my Episcopal wife’s ire.

“EE-BP is and always has been a poe, a satire, a spoof, a poke at absurd religious belief — a statement and a challenge to believers to belly up to the bar to prove their compassion and genuine commitment to one of their most outlandish interpretations of the bible. And guess what … they didn’t.”

He adds that “the NH Insurance Department will be either disappointed or relieved to find out this is all a fantasy and that no clients exist except in my imagination and on the pages of many hundreds of publications.”

“A: No. This is a serious offer to our Christian friends who believe in the Second Coming and honestly care about the future of their pets after the Rapture occurs.”

We mentioned Centre’s supposed venture once, by the way, in a post about Judgment Day entrepreneurs and pranksters. It appears we should have put him in with the jokers, not the capitalist. Our apologies.